April 2001

- The QIC tape format brought tape backups into the small machines. Prior to that you had the large tape transports you see in old movies with 10" reels of 1/2" tape. These were just extension of the reel-reel design with rather sophisticated tape handling mechanisms for high-speed movement and extreme acceleration movements - using air-bearings and vacuum chambers. They were not cheap, but disk drives and their removable packs were very expensive too.

- The sub-title of this book is "the end of business as usual". Well, maybe. The premise here is that the Internet and Open Source are going to change everything, that most corporations don't have a clue (hence the "cluetrain" title), and that indeed society itself will be changed by by sweeping forces we are only starting to experience now.

- VPN Basics. A VPN is a Virtual Private Network. The concept is that you are using public or other shared lines (generally the Internet) to connect machines, but that all packets are encrypted (so your connections are "private").

- Note: these are classic Unix permissions. However, many modern Unixes support extended attributes that go beyond this. We'll look at one example of that later in the article. You also need to know that Unix and Windows permissions don't map well to each other, so if you are using something like Samba or Visionfs , you need to understand how permissions will be shown and honored. Some examples of that are shown later.